Confessions of a Nursing Student: First Year Edition

The truth is, I never imagined myself as a nurse or a doctor. I always thought I could be someone who can take the easy way out of everything. Running around the hospital, giving shots to patients with different kinds of attitude and even encountering a person dying from losing so much blood isn’t what I expected in my life. When I was often asked by my parents what I want to be or what job do I want in the future, I randomly answered them with a weird smile and a pitchy voice saying I want to be someone cool like Sherlock Holmes who solves mysteries or a reporter who goes anywhere without worry and just remember the lines of the news. My parents would ruffle my hair and just laugh at my response, thinking how ridiculous my ambitions are. Well, in my defense, who doesn’t want a lot of money, right? During elementary, I enjoyed how simple machines work, how my arm functions or even how a small frog leaps. I was fascinated on how a simple living thing that’s smaller than me can even leap higher than I can. Simple joys, you could say that.

I enjoyed Mathematics when I could easily answer 1 + 1 or even 1 x 2 but I never imagined that I could hate it when x and y’s began to introduce themselves in Algebra and Geometry during high school. The mere question, “Find x.” truly boggled my mind more than anything. How was I supposed to find x when it’s right in front of me? Believe it or not, my Math teacher gave us that kind of quiz and I encircled the x’s in the equation, thinking how idiot my classmates are, taking their calculators out and was actually solving the question when x is right in front of their eyes. Really, true story. Oh and please don’t ask me what the result of my quiz was. Mathematics was a big no for me so I decided to focus my attention on Science. Science was amazing in a way that I couldn’t even understand what’s going on anymore. The teacher tackled the meaning, the branches and simple human anatomy which made me so engrossed and curious that I started to watch different movies and series of nurses and doctors, operating on a patient. (To the nurses out there, I know you did this too.) I couldn’t even comprehend the meaning of what they were saying during an operation. I tried to google the words and phrases they used but I was to amazed to even read or understand them. Just the word itself is amazing. It’s so long and so hard to pronounce. Like how do these people even say the word ‘Staphylococcus Aureus’ without biting their tongue or something? And watching those kinds of series made my living so weird that whenever I cut a fish in half, I ask my brother or sister to pass me a scalpel as if I was going to do an operation to a dead fish that was supposed to be our lunch for the day. High school came and it was the same. I ended up taking Biotechnology as a core subject and I enjoyed how a pig’s heart was once considered as replacement for the human heart, how bananas were usually seen growing in tropical areas (so true), and the first clone animal was named Dolly. My classmates in that subject were very interested in Science and some of them wanted to take Nursing and Biotechnology as a course for college so I decided to do the same. I just went with the flow since I didn’t want to be alone in college, you know. Meeting new friends in college is fun but it’s not the same without your friends in the same course you are. Well, the bottomline of this confession is that I just went with the flow to determine what course should I take in college. I love Science and I enjoy reading books about Anatomy and such so I maybe nursing really is the course for me. Nursing is the course that I never expected to take now that I’m in college but somehow? It’s reassuring that a lot of people were right; it is fun as a nursing student.